Telstra, a Melbourne-based provider of phone and Internet services, has admitted to secretly tracking websites visited by its mobile users and giving the information to Netsweeper, a Guelph-based firm that makes tools used to censor the Internet abroad. Tracking was conducted in the lead-up to the launch of a voluntary web-filtering tool, Telstra said in a statement, and no personal information was stored or shared in the process. But concerns over the Guelph-based firm’s reputation have fuelled criticism and speculation in Australia about what the web-browsing data — which was transmitted to a U.S.-based hosting provider and then compared to a blacklist of websites curated by Netsweeper — might really be used for.

Some are calling it a coup. President Fernando Lugo’s hasty impeachment and removal on 22 June is raising many concerns including concern about freedom of information. An organization like Reporters Without Borders that defends media freedom has every right to be alarmed, as the country’s democracy seems to have been shaken and undermined. An attempt to censor TV Pública immediately after the senate vote removing Lugo and the suspension of certain opinion programmes have reinforced our concern.

The American government’s bid to extradite copyright infringement king Kim Dotcom to the United States was dealt a body blow Thursday, when a New Zealand High Court judge ruled that the raids on Doctom’s home earlier this year were “illegal.” The decision may doom the entire prosecution of the founder of the file-sharing site Megaupload; New Zealand authorities are appealing.

Netsweeper, the Internet filtering supplier linked to Telstra’s voluntary filter trial is also a supplier to the Yemen, the UAE and Qatar. The Guelph Mercury states that filters implemented by those countries block sites associated with news, political activism and satire, religious freedom – and Tumblr, which in Yemen’s case is classified as pornography.